Nosedive

She puts a stone in my hand.

“Don’t forget where you come from.”

I bide my tongue. Wichita, old woman. But I know she is talking about the Old Land.

“Yes grandmother,” the stone is cool. I press it against my forehead and bow incrementally as custom dictates. The etchings carved across the soft marbled surface leave a gentle indent on my skin where I press too hard.

“You know what to do with that, or must I remind you?”

“I know, grandmother.”

Behind a wrinkled squint, her eyes gleam with self-amused tricks. Shining in the light of the dying sun they reveal the keen mind of her youth; her withheld witticisms, sharp reprimands, and sage tales. A day like today conjures up scores of stories from the Old Land - none of them strictly mine or hers but those of our ancestors, passed down for generations and shipped headlong over countless leagues of sea. I think of The Seven Sorrows and Northwest upon the Wing and The River Belt.

She whistles to herself and walks on, lithe footfalls dissipating with her figure into the crowd. I’d never seen her in black before. It suits her.

I remain a time longer because I must, commiserating with estranged family members, old neighbors, and half-forgotten friends. I eat store-bought salad laden with croutons and watch the condensation drip down my fogged glass of soda.

It’s not until I twist shut the lock of my slammed door and collapse onto my vaguely green couch that I realize I never actually stopped by his slot in the mausoleum. I must have been too caught up in the banal tidings of the living.

Weathered condolences and pleasantries coat my mind like a thick layer of ash.

At a certain point it's rage and only rage that makes any sense. Way down in the raw depth of languish, the only light that reaches is the striking insufficiency of language. In its stead, a flickering tongue of anger emerges and ignites the belly like dancing ember. I maintain my rage at a burn, stoking it with detachment.

I don’t notice that I’m still holding the stone until my fist is through drywall. When did I even get up from the couch? Stuck up to my forearm, I pull hard and my wrist slashes in shallow ribbons as my hand wrenches free, layers of cracked wall flaking to the ground below me. I open my trembling fist and the stone sits peacefully in my hand, caked canals of gypsum dust running through the twisting paths of my palm.

I step outside.

Sparkling constellations outline my bent frame as I walk through the backyard to the lumbering coastal oak that reigns over half the lawn. Here, roots rise high enough to serve as benches and if these roots could talk they too would share stories of the Old Land. Tales heard from my grandmother when I was still young enough to be swaddled in the crook of her arm, or from my father as I rested my head in his lap, contented mind swirling with fantastical images of distant lands.

I remember the grace of his twisted hand, gnarled as the knotted oak from assisting at my uncle’s forge, sifting through my hair as he whispered great tales. Of the sud of water that became a tidal wave. Of the farm boy whose crown of hay became his noose when townsfolk lynched him for setting ablaze the local granary. Of the moon when she transformed into a barn owl - flying silent in the night, sowing the seeds that would eventually birth the Waking Forest.

It’s the memory of my father’s hand, the phantom sensation of it gently caressing my worried head, that drives me to forego tradition. The stone must be buried so my father can parade through the channels of the Undercurrents with fellow sojourners to the Waking Forest. My grandmother probably smoothed and carved this soulstone decades ago when my father was even younger than I am now.

But in this moment, wrath outweighs custom and I find my fist balled, seeking an outlet.

I pin the stone against the tree trunk and let fly my troubled hand. Only three swings in until my knuckle gushes over in violent blood, streams of salient ichor oozing through the avenues of bark like gory sap. I slam my fist again and again; not knowing how many times, not hearing the knuckles pop like volcanic air bubbles, not feeling the lashing pangs of broken bone.

I drop my hand and stare at the great tree. Tarnished bits of oak litter the soil and hang loose from the trunk, the soulstone lodged into a groove of bark at its center. Blood streaks across the tree’s ridges and surface of the stone, the carved characters of my father’s name obscured under my thick claret.

I grab at the rock and try to peel it out, but it is wedged too tightly. I pull so hard my veins bulge like riversnakes but the stone doesn’t budge. I want to cry, I want to scream - but I’m extinguished. There is nothing I can feel.

I lean against the mighty oak and let my back slide down. I sit for an eternity, for thirty seconds, for thirty hours. I can’t tell. Long enough for my eyes to droop, for my chin to dip to my chest, for the tremors of my worried mind to alleviate for but a moment.

Yet, a nagging sense of alertness snaps me back awake.

I lean back, shifting to find a more comfortable position when one of the roots at my shoulder snaps and suddenly I’m slipping. I turn and try to halt myself.

The oak’s trunk has opened up immensely into an arched passage sloping downward into the ground - a sort of gateway to a massive hole of earth, black as pitch. The soulstone remains nestled in the tree groove at the top of the passageway’s mouth, etched characters now emanating an ancient green glow under the stain of my blood.

The roots around me groan and tremble. Mounds of dirt and grass spill into the passage as chunks of ground give, tumbling into the tree. I attempt to stand but am swept up in a sudden lurch of topsoil. Gravity grabs a hold of me and sends me spinning reckless into the hole.

***

Direction is meaningless as I careen down, catching sporadic streaks of light from the opening of the passage in my swirling vision. The flashes grow fainter and less distinct as my fall continues and the mouth of the passageway recedes from my tumbling sight. Eventually, I am tossed in complete darkness, losing any sense of coherence in my ragged descent. I no longer feel even the tumble.

Instead, there is a kind of weightlessness - the only feeling being that of the absence of one. I’m comprised of a lack of things. I can’t tell if my limbs are flailing or sitting still. The nosedive continues indefinitely until my mind is as wide as an elephant, my life as long as a tortoise.

I reach for my face to confirm that I still contain a form, that my being is still physical, and realize my hand is soaking wet. I wave it in front of me. The air is a torrid, cumbersome weight. Suddenly a pinprick of light flashes in the dark distance, glittering like a luminescent plankton in an endless expanse of ocean. It bobs gentle and aimless. I aim toward it and am no longer in freefall.

Rather, I'm wading through a dense liquid.

I labor forward and as the light grows on the horizon, the world begins to dawn. I find myself waist deep in an eternal pool of water extending in all directions, the single orb of light reflecting off its surface in wavering beams. Rolling laps of water pull toward and behind me in a gentle tide as light refractions splinter into oblivion. Dancing lines of auroras rise and bounce off the surface in a great kaleidoscopic pattern.

The light draws nearer and as it does I see the source of it is a lantern hanging from a tall, wooden staff held aloft by a creature no bigger than two feet tall. The creature is a pale yellow, its spherical body making up the heap of its insubstantial mass.

Stubbed legs waddle forward atop the water’s surface as if it were solid ground. Its tiny arms poke out where a human’s ears would be, in line with its beady eyes which are pure black and unblinking. The thing is like a pudgy, jaundiced head with limbs.

I go toward it and as I approach the creature raises its staff and stabs it downward. A booming thud peals through the void. The creature spills into the water and in that exact moment the lantern’s light dies.

Rich darkness ensues before a dull glow fades to life in the water at the base of the staff. The glow gathers and shifts like an incandescent inkblot in clear liquid, the sole spring of light in this eternal nightscape. As I draw nearer, I notice that the glowing blot is in fact the same creature that carried the staff, its form having shifted from solid to gaseous liquid.

What do you seek?

The words come from everywhere, occupying the infinitely vast space around me and the infinitely less vast space of my mind, but I know their source is the creature in the water. It swells in floating breaths like a nebula. I respond instinctively without use of my mouth.

I seek nothing.

All things want.

The glow of the blot grows and dulls with each bounding syllable of its thunderous voice, a speck of light in a cavernous void.

Not me. I want for nothing.

Do not lie to me, child.

I’m not the one who chose to come here.

Were you not?

No!

I’m shaking. My throat hoarse even though I swear I haven’t made any use of it. The water continues to flow in a steady stream around me as the shifting glow of the creature dances. Distant rushes of falling water make up the timbre of this place and with sudden clarity I’m aware of the tumult, aware that I am at the mouth of a colossal river running ceaselessly to a mighty end. I am aware of where I am.

This is the River Belt.

What have I done that you should draw from the fount of your ire, boy?

I-I don’t know. I’m sorry.

Silence.

Is this the Old Land? I thought everything from then was destroyed.

There is no was, child. All that was, is. Because it has been, thus it always will be.

I don’t understand.

A low rumble groans from the water. The creature’s hue sharpens in intensity, its essence glowing like a lightning rod. It begins to whirl - slowly at first but gaining in rapid force. The nebulous creature expands and soon all the pool around me is aglow with furious shine. The snuffed lantern-staff and I stand at the center of a brilliant eddy. It roars in hungry coil. With a flash, a stream of color lassos around my chest. Suddenly my form is tied to that of the creature. We meld together and I am enmeshed with the whirlpool.

A torrent of sensation arrests my mind.

I bear witness to shades of color and depth of light hitherto concealed from my faculties of sense; every firing synapse sparks with an eruption of explosive power. The atoms of my being pulse with sharp lucidity. I’m struck by a clear and wild certainty that I am pulsing in time with the whole of sentient life. That all living things abide by a universal heartbeat, pulled like inert blood cells through the vessels of the world.

I coalesce completely with the creature and the rush of roaring water and we blaze in a mad maelstrom, the whole river burning in tongues of flame. We rage and spin and in an instant are drawn toward the staff at the center of the vortex.

We shoot toward it in raucous delight and string up its base. Upward we race in a spiraled pursuit of stretched shape, twirling and chasing.

It is a fight and it is a dance.

A struggle and a surrender.

The staff shines with overwhelming energy, polished wood splintering under the pressure - yet just as it is ready to rupture, tense staff swollen with power, the light is snuffed.

Darkness returns.

The winds halt their flight, the air stifles, the breath of the world holds.

For just a moment.

In a trice, we jolt out and break the stillness with a bright burst of radiance, filling the lantern with billowing flame. In the fire, vague forms begin taking shape.

It’s a vision.

Or rather, a memory.

***

I remember this day.

They didn’t see me peering through the crack in the door. At my angle, crouched against the hallway wall, I could only divine slivers of them - the warm caress of my grandmother's hand, her hunger to siphon away my father’s pain through her weary palm, his arched back as it racked in a failed attempt to contain wet sobs. My young eyes watched.

“I’m so sorry, sweet boy. You’re okay,” she shushed gently, a calm wind.

“How can I ever be okay?”

His words were hardly decipherable through the phlegm of mourning.

“She is not here, but she is not gone. Everything is cyclical, child.” She rubbed the curve of his back in small circles. “To all you meet, you are but a collection of everyone and everything you hold dear. Countless tiny fragments make up the whole of you. Within you is a piece of me, and of her, and of everyone you’ve ever loved. No one is ever fully gone. No one disappears.”

“But how could she leave now? I still have all this love.”

“Use it, child. Love yourself so you may love her. And we’ll continue to love her, too. Through you.”

He moaned, a low and guttural wail.

“It’s okay. Release your tears, sweet child. Give them to the Belt.”

I blinked emptily at their figures through the slat. Downcast, I walked to the stairs. I made toward the first step - and slipped. My mind emptied and my stomach cartwheeled as I fell into a spin.

***

Shafts of morning light illuminate the veins of my eyelids. Foliage rustles in the branched canopy overhead and I crack open my eyes to the sight of yellow and auburn leaves twisting tiredly to the ground. A light breeze rustles my hair and whispers to me that I’m here. In sparse patches, the tree’s trunk is splashed with dull red flecks, otherwise it stands strong and whole. A stout oak.

Not as stout, I’m battered and sore.

My knuckles are scabbed over in a messy carapace of dried blood. I wince as my fingers flex and the scabs crack and shift like angry tectonic plates, blood unclotting and spilling through their seams in a gelatinous ooze. The patterned beams of sun slipping through the oak’s swinging branches illuminate my eyes and my head screams. I rub at my temples with ruined hands. Looking down, I notice in the grass beside me, the soulstone.

I pick it up and under the stain of my blood I can just work out my father’s faded name. I hobble over to the house and run the stone under the sink. I scrub away dry streaks of my shameful gore and shine it clean with cloth before walking back out to the lawn.

I head straight for the tree. Between its storied roots and under the plump clouds of eager morning, I kneel. I set the soulstone down and push my sorry hands into the soil at the bed of oak.

I dig.